Social Anthropology in Ortega’s work. His contribution to modern’s ethnography

Abstract

The following pages deal with the Ortega’s anthropology. I’m going to offer the Ortega’s contribution to modern’s ethnography. Ortega knew and debated the anthropological ideas of his time: evolutionist, particularist, difusionist, functionalist. Adopting a historical point of view, Ortega set out the reasons for his disagreement about the dogmatic, ethnocentric, evolutionist and progressive vision of the Western Europe in connection with of the universal history. He awards enormous importance in his writings to the recognition of ethnic and cultural horizons, which have been historically and traditionally forgotten, which turns him into the rigorous anthropologic theoretical one. These contributions that Ortega y Gasset realizes to the field of the anthropology in his social and cultural domain complete his reflections on the historical sense of the life and the purely vital perspective of every man and cultural society with which there deals specifically his historical and rational vital anthropology.